Posted on
Monday, July 6, 2009 in
StoriesOn select Mondays, I’ll link to a post that I consider powerful. These will be a roundup of stories from around the web. Please contact me if you have ideas for future editions.
Columnist J.A. Adande had this to tweet after Sunday’s sporting events:
Enjoy days like Sunday, with Roger Federer and Tiger Woods both on top of their game. They won’t last forever.
There is nothing especially profound about this statement. Of course nothing lasts forever. It doesn’t always seem like that, though. Oftentimes, it seems that things will always be the way they are.
Some things change so slowly, they hardly seem to change at all. I’ve never seen my fingernails grow, but they do get a bit long sometimes. Somehow, they go from being clipped to needing to be clipped again. Time seems to pass so slowly, but it still passes.
I can’t notice any changes in how I look from day to day, but I see pictures from the past and can’t believe how young I looked. My not being able to tell a difference doesn’t mean that nothing has happened.
And, oftentimes with life, things don’t seem to be going anywhere. Still, often without even realizing it, things do change.
My favorite singer/songwriter had an old song that never made it to one of his albums. He wrote about the wave of emotion that unexpectantly overcame him as he drove through the town he grew up in. He doesn’t sing the song anymore and the lyrics are nowhere to be found, but a few of the lines went something like this:
And it seems to me the earth turns so quiet, we pretend it’s standing still. And it’s time I learned that it’s time to live and there ain’t no time to kill… I saw the days of my youth, so bright like a Monticello Moon that waxed and waned and went away too soon. But the moon has come and gone, so I’m thinking I’ll get along. The moon has come and gone, so I had better be moving on.
It’s not good to get stuck in the past, but I do think that looking at the past can teach us a lot about enjoying the present. After all, today could be the day that another day you will tell stories about and long for.
Here is this week’s post.